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Home / Operating Systems / HowTo clone, image, and re-size your Hard Drive(s) and/or partition(s)/
HowTo clone, image, and re-size your Hard Drive(s) and/or partition(s)

To image, clone, and re-size your Hared Drive (HD) and/or partition , you can use any of the following applications/tools:

Clonezilla

Clonezilla, based on , Partition Image, ntfsclone, and UdpCast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Backing up partitions and HDs sounds like work -- until you've tried Clonezilla. Clonezilla allows you to clone and duplicate partitions of various formats, and disks of various sizes, either locally or over the network. Even more impressive is the fact that you can do all this without typing complicated commands.
Pros
Cons
  1. File System supported: ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, and FAT, NTFS of MS Windows. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux or MS windows.
  2. LVM2 (LVM version 1) under GNU/Linux is supported.
  3. Multicast is supported in Clonezilla server edition, which is suitable for massively clone.
  4. Based on Partimage, ntfsclone and dd to clone partition . However, clonezilla, containing some other programs, can save and restore not only partitions, but also a whole disk.
  5. By using another free software drbl-winroll, the hostname , group, and SID of cloned MS windows machine can be automatically changed.
  1. Clonezilla Server Edition is used to clone many computers simultaneously. In order to use it, you must first prepare a DRBL server. In addition the machine to be cloned must boot from a network (e.g. PXE/Etherboot).

CloneZilla Wiki, and FAQ

Ghost for Linux (G4L)

G4L is a hard disk and partition imaging and cloning tool. The created images are optionally compressed and transferred to an FTP server instead of cloning locally.
Pros
Cons
  1. G4L by default uses bit-for-bit cloning. That means G4L can copy any File System, partitioning setups, and schemes, regardless.
  2. G4L only needs an FTP server to operate in network mode. FTP servers are simple to setup, but not very secure.
  3. G4L does not have an X11 GUI. This makes it more universally compatible, and much faster on older systems. Some users are intimidated by the ncurses interface, however.
  1. Bit-for bit cloning can be a real waste of time and disk space since it clones "junk" data on logically empty parts of the HD and/or partition . This can be mitigated by zeroing the empty space on a disk, but it is still less efficient.
  2. G4L does not work with SFTP, SSH, NFS, or SaMBa.

G4L documentation | G4L Wiki

Ghosting for Unix G4U

G4U ("ghosting for unix") is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC Hard Disks (HDs) to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. The first is to upload the compressed image of a local HD to a FTP server, the other is to restore that image via FTP, uncompress it and write it back to disk. Network configuration is fetched via DHCP. As the HD is processed as an image, any File System and Operating System (OS) can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks as well as partitions is also supported.
Pros
Cons
  1. Small in Size. Easily fit on a USB drive and/or a CD. The HD to be cloned can hold any File System type including NTFS/FAT EXT 2 or 3, etc.
  2. Do not work with different disk sizes. g4u works best with identical disk sizes & geometry. You can put an image from a smaller disk on a bigger disk, but if you put an image from a bigger disk to a smaller disk, it is likely to experience technical issues.
  1. g4u reads the disk bit by bit, starting from byte #0 to the end. It includes any MBR, boot record, partition table and the partitions themselves without further investigating the structure of the data stored in these partitions.
  2. The image resulting from g4u is very big.

G4U Documentation | FAQ

Gnome Partition Editor (GParted)

GParted is an industrial-strength package for creating, destroying, resizing, moving, checking and copying partitions, and the file systems on them. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganizing disk usage, copying data residing on hard disks and mirroring one partition with another (disk imaging).
Pros
Cons
  1. Many File Systems are supported including: ext2, ext3, fat16 and 32, ntfs, reiserfs, xfs, and xfs.
  1. The current version of GParted does not support (LVM) File System

GParted Documentation | HowTo re-size a partition | FAQ | HowTo LiveCD | GParted Wiki

GNU Parted

GNU Parted is an industrial-strength package for creating, destroying, resizing, checking and copying partitions, and the file systems on them. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganising disk usage, copying data on hard disks and disk imaging.
Partimage is a Linux utility which saves partitions having a supported filesystem to an image file.
Pros
Cons
  1. Actively maintained.
  2. Support for CHS and LBA addressing modes.
  3. Support for logical sector sizes not equal to 512.
  4. Uses SI units (byte multiples of 1000), supporting arbitrary specification of disk locations in sectors, bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, cylinders and CHS notation.
  5. Knows about, detects and works around quirks of other partitioning tools and operating system implementations.  
  6. OS Supported: Linux and FreeBSD.
None reported!a

Parted Manual | FAQ | Parted User's Manual | Standard Partitions using parted

Partimage

Partimage is a Linux utility which saves partitions having a supported filesystem to an image file.
Pros
Cons
  1. Partimage is faster. You don't have to wait for "dd if=/dev/zero" first. during the copy, free blocks are not read/copied.
  2. There's a GUI (graphical user interface).
  3. Can work on file systems which are not supported (stable write support) by the Linux kernel , such as NTFS, BSD ffs, XFS/JFS in a non-patched kernel.
  4. The network support allows to save an image file from a client, without having to configure both client and server NFS. (Network File System).
  5. We provide rootdisk and bootcd. You can boot on it, if Linux is not installed on your computer. They contains everything that is need (the LZO compression in 0.7, which is very useful for big files).
  1. The current Stable v0.6.7 can only read/write from/to a partition . Partimage doesn't use the partition table at all.
  2. You can't restore to a smaller partition (you will have an error), but it's possible to restore to a lager one. In this case, some space will be lost.
  3. Partimage don't have a resize feature, but you can use other tools.
  4. The current Stable v0.6.7 supports i386 systems and PowerPC ONLY.

Partimage Manual | FAQ

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Posted: 31 Jul, 2008 by: Customer Service S.
Updated: 03 Mar, 2011 by: Customer Service S.

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